Ollie’s Halloween
As I’ve said in other posts, we’re not a big fan of Halloween for the first several years of a little one’s life. We focus on feeling safe versus scared for the first few years. Beware and scare are two words and emotions repeated several times in this story, so I would avoid the story for little ones. As I’ve seen in family life, a little one needs no help in scaring him or herself at this point in life.
The illustrations are cute, and the story does have a nice lesson on the last page for little ones, done with a perfect little distortion of a line repeated earlier, but it comes well after a lot of scaring and bewaring throughout the other pages.
Cautions: There are ghosts, wizards, scarecrows and storms present. This story includes all things scary about Halloween for little ones, including a moment at the end when one of the characters is left alone in the dark. We skipped that part, along with a few other pages, when reading because my little one, on her own, has already asked questions like “would you ever leave me all alone, daddy?” and I didn’t want a make-believe story adding to my little one’s already present fears.
